A blog to talk about my major obsessions – the craft of writing, going to book clubs, and reading. Always reading.

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As everyone knows, there are few greater things in life than spending time in a good bookshop. And whilst I’m a huge fan of Waterstones, and very happy that they are showing a profit, for me there is no greater pleasure than spending time and some hard-earned than in an independent bookshop. Readers of this blog will know that I am something of a crime fiction fiend. I try to pick up crime novels whenever I can (especially older, rare tomes) and have spent many an hour rummaging through bookshelves looking for yellowed copies of the books of my pulp heroes. I’m on the constant lookout for independent bookshops to go to, and thanks to following a number of American crime writers on Twitter, my attention was drawn to The Mysterious Bookshop, a crime hangout in New York and the oldest crime and mystery-specific bookstore on the planet. Luckily I recently had a family occasion in that very city, so what better way to wile away an afternoon than with a visit…

A fantasy of mine, whenever I get my own house, is to indulge in some decent bookshelves. Something like the ones in the Mysterious, if dreams could come true. Floor-to-ceiling shelves covering three walls of the shop. Man oh man. And to navigate them, those ladders that run on wheels that scooted across the carpet as I spotted a high-up section of Jim Thompson paperbacks. I think I probably died and went to heaven within seconds of stepping through the door. The breadth of their inventory was better than anything I’ve ever seen. The complete Travis McGee novels of John D. Macdonald. Extensive copies of his namesake Ross’s Lew Archer novels. The aforementioned Thompson. A massive section devoted to Sherlock Holmes. Reams of used and vintage titles, too. Plus plenty of rare editions and signed copies, including a signed copy of Elmore Leonard’s Freaky Deaky (probably my favourite of the great man’s works) for $35. I debated buying it for ages, picking the book off the shelf and putting it back again more than once. In the end I decided not to. It’s a decision I’m still not sure was the right one.

So what did I purchase in the end? Even after turning down the Leonard, I’m still really happy with my choices. I’m on a mission to purchase all the Matt Scudder novels of Lawrence Block, and I picked up a signed copy of A Long Line Of Dead Men for the scarcely believable price of $5. I didn’t actually know it was signed until I left the shop either so that was a nice surprise! I also filled a gap in my James Crumley collection with Bordersnakes, which brings his two protagonists Sughrue and Milodragovitch together for one wild ride. Lastly I bought a biography of Raymond Chandler which I am halfway through and very much enjoying.

Now I could probably have bought all these books on Amazon or eBay. But the experience of spending time in a great bookshop, with knowledgeable staff and no pressure to leave, is one of the great joys in life. Its these important touches that make the Mysterious so good. You feel amongst like-minded friends as soon as you walk in the door. And they are a big player in the scene, too. Tons of authors do readings and book launches there (including Block, the day after I flew home…sob!) and some writers produce exclusive material directly for the store. Indeed, they give a free short story away to customers every Christmas, with the store having to feature in the story somehow. A bit of extra publicity, and a unique tale to read on the subway home. This years story was by Laura Lippman and it’s great. Seriously, what more could you want?

I know this sounds like I’ve been paid by them to say all this, so I’ll just say that if you’re a book lover and find yourself in Manhattan, go there and experience it for yourself. You won’t be disappointed.

The National Novel Writing Month, or #Nanowrimo to use the modern parlance, is an event I’ve seen all over social media this month. Essentially – write a novel of 50,000 words in the month of November. I hadn’t heard of this before, but it’s quite a nice idea. Having a daily word count tracker to see how much you’ve done, personalised badges along the way, and most importantly, access to forums and other writers for inspiration and to motivate you as you go along. This is all good stuff. But I don’t think it’s something I could ever be a part of.

Why? 50,000 words in a month works out at just under 2,000 words a day. Which is manageable if you get on a good run. But sustaining that output for 30 days would be beyond me. And even if I could do it, the quality of my writing would be abysmal. I guess the point of the event is to overcome the fear of being able to write that number of words in the first place, and have somewhere to turn when it all seems impossible. I get that.

However that fear isn’t one I possess anymore. My problem is the opposite. As soon as I think that a story is running into novel territory (over 30,000 words is my benchmark) the story seems to expand and expand until the finishing line is an every distant mirage. And trying to get wrapped up by a certain date is beyond me. With my current novel, I gave myself a loose date of my birthday to get the first draft finished. Well that’s been and gone. Then it was before I go to New York on holiday. That’s in about three hours time, so that’s out the window as well. So now we’re looking at Christmas, which will be about 400 days since I started on the damn thing. Even then I’m fairly sure I will overrun into 2018, which means I will have spent the entire calendar year working on this novel. Beggars belief.

Have I lost the ability to write concise prose? That’s the question I ask myself. I shuffle along at 500 words a day like the tortoise rather than the hare. And will still be going long after everyone else has packed up and gone home. 50,000 words in a month? No chance. I’m lucky to write a third of that in 30 days. 180,000 words and counting in just over a year? I’m your man.

I’m starting to wonder if the first draft of this novel is ever going to be finished. To say that progress is going at a snails pace would be an insult to snails. In a previous post I predicted that the novel would end up overshooting 150,000 words. Well we’re a fair way beyond that and still the finishing line shimmers in the distance and each step closer turns out be a mirage.

It’s extraordinary, in a way. A common fear that puts many people off trying to write a novel is a lack of confidence that they can produce the requisite number of words. You can say it’s a word at a time, and everyone starts with a blank page, but it’s easy to believe that the great writers can reel off a book without too much trouble while the rest of us struggle to remember how to structure a passable sentence, let alone a paragraph. Indeed, I used to have this fear. Part of the reason I wrote my first novel in my early twenties was to prove that I could have the discipline to sit down every day and and write, and not be overawed by the dreaded word count.

Now though, I seem to have gone to the opposite extreme. I can’t fucking stop. This is not to say that I’m not afflicted with self-doubt and paranoia and is this all just a waste of time syndrome, because those foibles speak louder than ever. But thinking 80,000 words was a daunting prospect? Well those days are over, my friend. 80,000 words seems nice and cosy and comfortable. 500 words a day and you’re there in less than six months. That would be lovely. In a couple of weeks time I will have been working on this for a year and written over double that. And at risk of getting it totally wrong again, I could be looking at 200,000 words on completion. Which would run to about an 800 page paperback. That makes Tolstoy look concise. I’m quite embarrassed by it, genuinely. It’s absurd. I’m in new territory, alright. A whole different universe. 200,000 words that will probably only be read by a handful of people. I’ll probably break my arm just carrying a copy of the manuscript around.

So how did it get this way? I really don’t know. I think it’s fear, as most things are when deep in a first draft. Maybe I’ve lost the ability to construct a concise sentence. Or be able to show emotion with a look or a line of dialogue rather than reams of obvious exposition. Simply, that I’ve lost my touch. That whatever tiny spark of competency I had has been swallowed up by pretentious waffling. But now I’m hacking through the jungle, it’s persevere or be consumed by the shadows. I just hope that the daylight will break through soon.

This weekend saw my occasional visit to my sister’s book club in the wonderful city of Cologne, Germany. It was my third appearance and since my last, at the beginning of this year, the makeup of the group has changed somewhat, with a couple of long-running members leaving for various reasons. Book clubs can contain some friction between members, primarily over choices for forthcoming meetings, which sounds fickle but can result in some real arguments over the direction of the club. Anyway, ths turbulent passage has passed for the Cologne club and the core group is the same, so there were plenty of familiar faces to catch up with and an interesting book to discuss.

Rose Tremain is probably most famous for her novel The Gustav Sonata, which I believe was a Man Booker winner. Our choice was The Road Home, her tale of immigrant Lev, who comes to London from an unnamed European country (a stylistic decision which I found a little grating) to try to provide a better life for his family back home. In the current political climate this topic is something of a hot potato, so I was looking forward to a warts-and-all story of hardship and toil which sunk its teeth into the issues surrounding those who seek a better life in a faraway country.

Unfortunately I came away from reading the book a little disappointed. Whilst Lev does go through many travails as he attempts to carve out a niche for himself, the narrative never gave an impression that these problems would prove unable to solve. Indeed, Lev’s rise from humble sawmill worker to leading chef required an enormous suspension of disbelief to get your head around. The plot was unrealistic to me. On a number of occasions I thought Tremain relied on a perfect coincidence or a vast gesture of goodwill from a fellow character to propel Lev’s journey along. The right person tended to pop up at exactly the right moment, either with financial help when he most needed it or the offer of a roof or employment. I wanted to enjoy the kindness of the strangers he met, but I’m afraid my possibly world-weary cynicism prevented me from doing so.

There were some very jarring episodes in the story that felt completely out of place, too. Lev gets into a relationship with fellow kitchen worker Sophie, a woman many years his junior, and after it breaks down, there is a bizarre, borderline rape scene which is explicit in detail and is glossed over with very little explanation or fallout. Later on, Lev goes to work picking fruit on an East Anglian farm and there is another peculiar scene where two Chinese workers seduce Lev after a night out. Again, it’s as if Tremain forgets this ever took place, for it is barely mentioned the next morning. The flow of the story is interrupted by such acts and just added confusion and a hint of ugliness that is completely at odds with the charm and romanticism of the rest of the narrative.

I wanted to like this book more than I did, for I admired some of the minor characters greatly and Tremain skeched them with a lot of skill. And I liked the positive theme of human kindness that threads through the book. We could all be more empathetic to our fellow human beings, after all. But the narrative flaws were too much for me to get over and as such I’d have to say that the book is an gallant, but flawed exploration of the immigrant experience.

One of the things about being deeply immersed in the first draft of a novel is how it is virtually impossible to get a grip on the overarching theme that holds everything together. I begin every day’s writing with a sense of what is going to happen in the immediate scene that is approaching, but for anything further down the line, it starts to get a little hazy.

This is good in a way, but causes problems in another. As I’ve written many times before, not knowing with complete certainty what is going to happen is exciting. I’m as eager to find out as anyone else. And you would hope that if I can’t work it out, when the novel comes to be read by someone else, they will react in the same manner.

The downside of this method is twofold. Firstly, it’s very easy to overwrite. As the characters start to come alive and make decisions on their own, I find that most of my job at that point is simply running to keep up. I’m taking down as much as I can of their actions, but in the moment, I have no idea whether what they are doing is important or not. Some of it surely will be, but a vast swathe will not. Good editing will eradicate most of the superflous stuff, if you have a sturdy mind and the ability to get rid of something even if it’s the best paragraph you’ve ever written. The length of my latest novel is already getting out of control, heading for 150,000 words with no end in sight, but if I can be disciplined, that will be substantially cut in the first edit. Applying the ‘show, don’t tell’ principle to its core will do a lot of the work.

So far then, so good. But the second risk is that the manuscript disappears so far down the rabbit hole it’s impossible to see the way out. My manuscript is written from three characters perspectives, in overlapping time and with a substantial amount of back story to refer to. The pitfalls are enormous – not just making sure that character motivation is realistic, but also that their actions are based on what they know. All the protaganists have turned out more devious, secretive and opportunistic than I envisaged, so it’s a constant struggle trying to remember the secrets they have and what has and hasn’t been revealed in their interactions with others.

This tangled thicket is one that would be easy to become trapped in, and I fear that I’m vulnerable to its grip. I feel I am juggling so many balls in the air already, and I’m sure they will be further unseen twists to come that will make my job all the more difficult. And this trap is one that is so much harder to deal with in a re-write. Not only will the novel need paring, but substantial scenes will need to be completely rewritten to ensure the threads all tie up. Which could lead to a maze of deadends, like trying to work out a sudoku when you’ve added a wrong number somewhere along the way.

For now though it’s a case of full steam ahead. The clock has ticked up to nearly ten months on this novel, and I need it finished. WIth the right mindset, and a careful analysis of back story, I can hopefully avoid mistakes of motivation and emerge from the rabbit hole with a coherent story intact.

One of the joys of modern life is that someone somewhere has probably started a podcast on your favourite topic. Literature is no exception, and I’ve found recently than one of my favourites is The Moment, hosted by Brian Koppelman, co-creator of the TV series Billions.

The reason I like it is because it endeavours to get under the skin of the guest and find out how and why they do what they do. It’s not just committed to writers, there have been actors, even politicians, but I find the author based episodes the most revealing, and the latest, with Don Winslow, author of The Force and The Cartel (one of my books of 2016), to be one of the best so far.

Writers talking about their creative routines are an endless fascination for me, despite everyone doing it differently and there being no magic bullet. Winslow started on yellow manuscript paper with nothing more than a title for his first book, no outline, nothing. Now he writes for ten hours a day starting at 5.30am, which makes me feel positively lazy. And a phrase he used really hit me between the eyes – write like you’re afraid of getting caught. Exactly how it is.

What really interested me is when the discussion moved on to hubris. Because wanting to be a writer is very much a tale of opposites. You need the ego to say with confidence that your writing is worthy of the readers money, and more importantly, their time. When you are struggling, as I am now with my latest novel, it’s difficult to approach your work with this confidence, almost arrogance that your work is worth it. Once you have success under your belt, which Winslow does (and well deserved it is too), it is easier to come to the page with less fear, and he talks really well about this. The danger of course is when this slips into hubris. Hubris is interesting because it doesn’t necessarily stem from high self-esteem, it’s more an inflated sense of self-importance compared to a perhaps more modest reality. The conflict between these two extreme states is a pitfall many writers experience and is one I can really relate to.

There are tons more titbits to chew over from this episode and all I want to do really is give the podcast my whole-hearted recommendation. Two writers talking candidly about the craft is a joy to listen to. The back catalogue of episodes has some great archive material too – Salman Rushdie and Lawrence Block are two that stand out in my mind. It’s a podcast that makes you think, and best of all for any budding writer, helps you realises that a) you aren’t alone and b) the bad times and the rejection letters are something every writer goes through. Which is nice to hear when you really need it.

Finding time to get stuff down is the age-old problem for any writer, as real life tends to get in the way, most notably employment. For the last six months I haven’t had that problem and have enjoyed the luxury of writing whenever I want, but I’ve just got back into full-time work and so my opportunities are more limited. As I discussed in my last post, I’m still wading through the first draft of my third novel, and I’m desperate to get it finished so I can take a short breather and work on something else. But now I’m working again my writing time is shoehorned into a few frantic minutes in the evening. This is having a notable effect on two things, one of which is certain and the other is more tenuous, but both worthy of explanation.

To say that work makes it more difficult to write is a bit of a misnomer, if I’m honest. Only the very best make a living out of fiction, the rest of us muddle through as best we can. But if you want to write every day, you can. Elmore Leonard used to write two pages before work every morning, getting up at 5am to do so. I suspect some snatch small periods of time whenever they can, regardless of location or time of day. I wrote my second novel Playing with Fire whilst working nights, and this suited me perfectly. Home at 5am, sleep until lunchtime, write for a couple of hours every afternoon, then do it all again. This suited me well and I think helped shape the narrative. Once it got to around 1pm I started to focus on the upcoming writing period, the problems of everyday sliding into the background somewhere, trying to encourage the muse to show up. Having this regimented structure I think was the difference that got the first draft completed. It’s hard when you’re unpublished and halfway through something that has grown bigger and scarier than everything that went before. It’s a weight, and one than can be so daunting the fear can inhibit. But for me, having that couple of hours, that thousand to two thousand words a day to work on in a specific time window, got it done. It made it more manageable, breaking it down into one session at a time, and I managed to overcome my doubts.

Now though, I’m on a more regular nine-to-five schedule. Due to the travails of commuting, I’m up at 6am and home over twelve hours later, Monday to Friday. Unlike Mr Leonard I’m not much of a morning person, so getting up at the crack of dawn to write would see me flagging with exhaustion after a few sessions. So my only chance comes post-dinner in the evening, once the thoughts of the working day have cleared and there’s space up top for creativity to flow. But even that this period seems to have squeezed into an hour at most at the laptop. I can barely write for more than that before fatigue sets in. In days gone by, two to three thousand words per session was achievable. Now I’m lucky to get a quarter of that.

I also worry if my physical state is affecting the quality of the manuscript. I like to hope that the characters voices will push themselves through regardless, but as tiredness takes me over the concern is that whilst I’m getting the bare minimum down, it could easily be of such a poor state that it will need to be discarded or heavily edited in the rewrite. I used to have brilliant days where I’d look at the clock and two hours had gone by and somehow three or four pages had been written like it was an elaborate magic trick. Now I clock watch and get frustrated when in my short time frame I’ve written barely a paragraph.

Still, the draft will be finished by hook or by crook if I’m drawing a bus pass by the time it’s finished – I am nothing if not stubborn. I guess it’s impossible to quantify whether my new lifestyle has helped or hindered the work, or if it would have come out the same regardless; it doesn’t stop me wondering, though.